Hi, I hope it’s ok to ask this here. I’ve posted a lot about my childhood experiences on here as a way of trying to work out things that happened to me, as well as having a lot of therapy. I’ve namechanged so that this thread isn’t linked to my others, but I’m a relatively longstanding poster.
I’ve come to understand that my mum was emotionally abusive towards me as a child. My therapist also thinks she has and had narcissistic traits. There was anger, pure rage, silent treatment, all of the ‘usual’. But I’m also starting to consider whether there was an element of covert sexual abuse too.
I didn’t know that that’s what it was (or could be) called until recently, but I knew that mum’s boundaries were skewed. We were never allowed privacy from her. We had to have the bathroom door wedged open when we were in the bath even into our teens. She would walk into our rooms unannounced and go through our private things, and then leave them on the bed so we knew she had found them.
One moment in particular that keeps replaying in my mind is from when I was about 16. It was a weekend morning, and it was a very private moment for me (without wanting to go into details, but hopefully you understand what I mean). I would have been absolutely silent. My mum suddenly walked in, walked right up to the bed, sat on the bed and put her hand on me on top of the duvet and said how fast my heart was beating. And then she left and brought back a cup of tea.
There’s other weird things - I remember her chasing my sister up the stairs at maybe 6 or 7, calling her ‘sexy legs’. When I went to uni, mum complained that she no longer knew what underwear I liked to wear because she wasn’t doing my washing any more. She also asked me if I’d read 50 Shades of Grey when it came out (again I would have been a young teenager at the time). She would walk into my room when I was changing and comment on my ‘dimply’ bum.
On top of this, healthy discussion about relationships and puberty were non-existant. I had my first boyfriend at about 15 and the extent of her ‘talk’ was ‘don’t go upstairs’ (although I didn’t end up having sex until 18). She also brought my sister to me with my sister in tears because her period had started and she thought she was dying. Mum wouldn’t tell her what was going on and hadn’t told her anything at all.
Can anyone advise whether this was what I think it was? Covert sexual abuse, just skewed boundaries, something else? Please help x